Leda Braga, CEO of Systematica Investments

Leda Braga discusses founding and building the culture of the investing firm Systematica Investments, how science and technology drives her investment strategy, and her observations on the latest trends in the systematic investing landscape.

On building a diverse culture: “It’s important to not only attract diverse people, but to let them be who they are…. Does anybody ever stop and think, ‘Well, is it okay to act differently? Is it okay to be myself – to be the odd person around the table occasionally?' And so we try to be very open and welcoming of diversity.”

On how technology drives her investing strategy: “We’ve had some success developing alternative approaches to measure the trend signal using machine-learning, and we’ve recently updated our main program for these formulations. We went from one formulation to a blend of five and then deployed machine-learning techniques – not only on the side of understanding the relationship between the trend indicators and the forecast return, but also dimensionality reduction: ‘Shall I just group the assets differently before I process the trend?’ Things like that.”

 

This episode was filmed during the 2019 Systematic Investing Conference.